Progressive Christians Uniting

At Guantanamo: Death Before Dishonor

It used to be U.S. Marines who said they preferred death to dishonor. Now, and tragically, it’s our Marines who dishonor everything the U.S. says it stands for by shooting first and asking questions (or not asking them) later. And instead of our boys, it’s our detainees—those unlawful combatants rounded up in our post-9/11 panic—who are choosing death rather than accept the degradation and dishonor their keepers inflict upon them day after day after day.
Quoted in The New York Times, the camp’s commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, Jr., wasn’t just mad; he was damned mad at those sumbitches for their treachery. Harris accused the three suicides of commiting an act of “assymetrical warfare” against the U.S., adding: “they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own!”

Odd place to be bringing up the culture-of-life stuff, isn’t it? Why didn’t the commander go all the way and quote Church dogma on the terrible sin that is suicide. Why, we won’t be able to bury those three in a properly consecrated cemetery! We’ll have to bury them out back somewhere with the beasts of the field. Sumbitches!!!

I have been saying for some time to my fellow clergy leaders that if they really want to put a halt to America’s latest round of warring madness there is just one issue to take into their pulpits and into their parish discussions, and that issue is the triple-headed beast of detention, rendition, and torture. Not to rub the parishioners’ faces in it in an angry blame-America-first way. But to leave official torture hanging there as a grave question: “Is this the country we want? Is this who we want to be? Do we have the moral imagination to wonder how we would feel if others treated us in this manner?”

Recall that only 10 of approximately 500 detainees at Guantanamo have even been charged with crimes. Most detainees were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Inmates seeking justice in American courts have been thwarted at every turn by claims of “national security.” And new appeals will surely fail because of our government’s use of an odious special law that deprives Guantanamo detainees of any right to challenge their imprisonment. We have truly created a gulag, and not just in Cuba but at other secret detention centers across the globe.

I predict that preachers and teachers who raise these questions carefully and thoughtfully will not lose their pulpits, or at least most won’t. They will be heard, and they will be respected for being authentic troublers of Israel in a dark time. It will be more effective still if they bring to their churches and temples some real live military men and women: some veterans or war resisters, some Gold Star mothers or other military family members who are asking the same painful questions about who we Americans are turning into as we blindly seek to quash terrorism by quashing our own humanity.

It won’t help preachers to rant and rave about this being far from the first time the U.S. has behaved brutishly or to take congregations on a reality tour of our bloody history. There’s no need to harangue folks about ethnic cleansing in the Philippines, etc. That history is real, but we can’t change it now. Gitmo and Iraq we can change.

If contemporary Americans prefer to think of themselves as good—and they do—then preachers and religious educators just need to start with that datum and invite their congregants to look at what the U.S. is doing right now and in our name in relation to basic issues of right and wrong. If one or two congregants push back with reflexive flagwaving (and they will, if Fox News has been doing its job) the preacher’s task is to go even deeper and remind congregants that it is just as patriotic to keep your country from dying as it is to die for your country.
And our country is surely dying, spiritually and ethically, with each day that we stay this awful course.

Posted under: Director's Cut, Happening in the World